Games giant Electronic Arts (EA) launched an open beta for its highly anticipated first-person shooter, Battlefield 6, over the weekend. However, the game was quickly met with a significant influx of cheaters, prompting a robust response from EA’s anti-cheat division.
Almost immediately following the beta’s release, players flooded online forums and social media with complaints about encountering cheaters. In response, a representative from Electronic Arts’ anti-cheat team, identified only as “AC,” shared an update on an official forum. AC revealed that over the first two days of the beta, players reported an estimated 104,000 “instances of potential cheaters.” More significantly, EA’s systems successfully stopped a staggering 330,000 “attempts to cheat or tamper with anti-cheat controls.”
To combat these threats, Electronic Arts employs a sophisticated kernel-level anti-cheat system known as Javelin. Similar to systems used by other major game developers like Riot Games for Valorant, Javelin operates with the highest possible privileges on a player’s computer. This deep access allows the system to monitor all activities on the machine, effectively detecting cheats that often run hidden in the background, disguised as legitimate programs.
The game also mandates the use of Secure Boot, a hardware-based security feature integrated into Windows. AC acknowledged that Secure Boot is not a complete solution but rather a crucial component in their defense strategy. “Secure Boot is how you’re helping us build up our arsenal,” AC explained. “It’s another barrier that helps us make it harder for cheat developers to create cheat programs, and makes it easier for us to detect it when they do.”
Highlighting the ongoing nature of this digital conflict, AC further stated, “Anti-Cheat isn’t one and done, it’s an ever evolving battlefield, and what has worked for us previously or in different games doesn’t always work in all of them.” An EA spokesperson confirmed that the company currently has no updated figures on the total number of players banned as a result of these measures.
The challenge of cheaters is a pervasive issue across the online gaming industry. Companies such as Activision for its Call of Duty series and Riot Games have also implemented advanced kernel-level anti-cheat systems to maintain fair play. These systems often employ a multi-faceted approach, which can include banning offending accounts, leveraging Windows security features to restrict cheat execution, identifying players by their hardware fingerprints to prevent account hopping, and even infiltrating online cheat communities.
